Janeane Garofalo's first love of stand-up comedy

The actress has quit romcoms to pursue her passion for performing and is in Edinburgh in August and London in September

Janeane Garofalo strides the stage at the alt-rock festival South by Southwest like Rage Against the Machine's spiky-mouthed sister, leaning forward now and then as if mounting the monitors for a fret-cracking chord crash. She's hurling her scorn on the Republican party, riffing on their various 2008 election statements and comparing them with policies from the 18th century; then she leaps back, her vest shiny in the heat, and slips into goofy girl talk about her lady-bits. This is not the kind of behaviour you expect from a movie star.

To be fair, many of her big movies are nearly 10 years old now. In the late 1990s, she was almost a romcom queen, playing the twin lead with Uma Thurman in The Truth About Cats & Dogs and stealing the show from Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino in Romy and Michele's High School Re­-union. She slouched through Ben Stiller's